My Book

David Healy talk about problems with evidence-based medicine. Example of Simpson’s paradox in suicide rates.

The ten worst mistakes of DSM-5. This is miserably argued. The author has two sorts of criticisms: 1. Narrow a diagnosis (e.g., autism): People who need treatment won’t get it! 2. Widen a diagnosis (e.g., depression) or add a new one (many examples): This will cause fads and over-medication! It isn’t clear how to balance the two goals (helping people get treatment, avoiding fads and over-medication) nor why the various changes being criticized will produce more bad than good. Allen Frances, the author, was chair of the committee in charge of DSM-4. He could have written: “When we wrote DSM-4, we made several mistakes . . . . The committee behind DSM-5 has not learned from our mistakes. . . .” That would have been more convincing. That the chair of the committee behind DSM-4, in spite of feeling strongly about it, cannot persuasively criticize DSM-5 speaks volumes.

The Lying Dutchman. “Very few social psychologists make stuff up, but he was working in a discipline where cavalier use of data was common. This is perhaps the main finding of the three Dutch academic committees which investigated his fraud. The committees found many bad practices: researchers who keep rerunning an experiment until they get the right result, who omit inconvenient data, misunderstand statistics, don’t share their data, and so on.”